


Empty Heroics, Low Comedy, Pointless Death

by imogenbynight



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Divergent, Dean Winchester Has an Existential Crisis, Gratuitous References to Vonnegut, M/M, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:47:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27225271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imogenbynight/pseuds/imogenbynight
Summary: Dean’s mind is sticking on the one question he can’t ever hope to answer: was Chuck’s manipulation limited to the world around them—the maze Dean had described to Sam, where Chuck built an obstacle course and set them loose like lab rats—or were they designed, too?Are Dean’s thoughts his own? His feelings? His reactions and actions, his likes and dislikes? His love for his family and his friends?If Chuck has been behind all of it, then who is he? Who are any of them?
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 16
Kudos: 62





	Empty Heroics, Low Comedy, Pointless Death

**Author's Note:**

> This three-part fic is set around the beginning of season fifteen, and diverges from canon by the end of part one.
> 
> I started writing this immediately after the first episode of the season aired, kept writing through episodes two and three, and then... life happened. Rowena’s arrival into town happens a little differently than on the show, and I reduced Ketch to a sidenote because, frankly, screw that guy. So I suppose this counts as alternate canon? 
> 
> Whatever you want to call it, here’s part one. Parts two and three coming soon.

“The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

For the better part of twenty-three years, as he’s travelled in a seemingly endless and uneven loop around the lower forty-eight, there’s been a dog-eared, pilfered copy of Vonnegut’s _The Sirens of Titan_ among Dean’s scant few possessions. 

The book spent its first handful of months in the bottom of Dean’s duffle bag. Then, a year or so jammed into the Impala’s glove compartment, and a few after that tucked into the increasingly tattered Steve Madden shoebox with John’s collection of worn out cassette tapes. For several months in 2009, it was wedged under the edge of a mattress in Bobby Singer’s spare room, and then, eventually, it ended up in its current home—nestled between a stolen motel bible and a book of Enochian protection spells in the only bedroom Dean has had to call his own since he was four years old. 

These days, the first page is held in place by several strips of yellowed tape, each layer added when the previous one started to come loose. In the back, there’s an empty pocket where a library borrowing card used to go.

On the front cover, a long, diagonal crease runs from the lower left corner to the upper right, bisecting the title so that it looks like it reads _The Sire of Tit_ if you’re not paying close enough attention.

Dean had just turned seventeen when he first picked it up.

The public library in Chisholm, Minnesota had been across the street from one of the only paying jobs Dean’s ever had. For the two months that he and Sam were stuck in the small town—waiting while John and a hunter they never met made slow work of tracking a wendigo in the George Washington State Forest—he’d finish his shift at Video Hut, and wander over to meet Sam, whose thrill at the novelty of staying in one place for two whole months had translated, naturally, into joining an after-school study club.

Every afternoon, Dean would arrive at the library, wave at Sam through the study room window, and make himself comfortable on the nearest chair for the twenty minutes it would take Sam and his new friends to wrap things up. He usually just grabbed whichever book had the most interesting cover on the closest shelf. He’d read a few pages for something to do, then shove it back in place when Sam was done. A couple of weeks in, though, he’d started reading _Slaughterhouse-Five_ and hadn’t wanted to put it down.

He used Sam’s library card to borrow it, and finished it three days later. He borrowed _Sirens_ next, and when they left town, it had ended up mixed in with his things, bundled up with the too-big Carhartt jacket he’d found at a garage sale in Idaho and shoved into the bottom of his duffel bag. That’s when it got the crease in the cover. The dog-eared pages came later, when he read it for the second time. Third time. Eighth.

Soon, he started seeking out more books whenever he found himself with a little bit of downtime, whenever Sam was preoccupied and not in need of his help or company. Over the years, he worked his way through the rest of Vonnegut’s catalogue before moving on to Kerouac and Palahniuk and a decent chunk of Burroughs. Vonnegut, though, was responsible for the first book he’d read just for the hell of it. For the simple pleasure of it. He’s always had a soft spot for the author because of that.

So, on the mile-long list of things that Chuck has thoroughly ruined, Dean’s appreciation for Vonnegut novels has to be somewhere near the bottom in terms of importance, but… man.

There’s just something so vindictive about the way he’d played along all those years ago— _It’s Kilgore Trout Vonnegut, haha, we’re all friends here_ —that it makes Dean want to smack the soulless prick directly in his smug, smirking mouth.

Right now, standing in an empty classroom at John C. Harlan High School and staring at some unknown English teacher’s list of extra credit reading assignments scrawled across the chalkboard, Dean thinks about _Slaughterhouse-Five_ , and _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ , and _Twelve Monkeys_ , and every other book and movie that has ever made him think about the concept of free will for more than three seconds, and wonders if Chuck was responsible for their creation in this universe as some kind of private joke shared only with himself. 

If he had watched Dean reading them and laughed.

More than anything, though, Dean’s mind is sticking on the one question he can’t ever hope to answer: was Chuck’s manipulation limited to the world around them—the maze Dean had described to Sam, where Chuck built an obstacle course and set them loose like lab rats—or were _they_ designed, too? 

Are Dean’s thoughts his own? His feelings? His reactions and actions, his likes and dislikes? His love for his family and his friends? 

If Chuck has been behind all of it, then who _is_ he? Who are any of them?

Because he can’t shake the all-encompassing fear that, at best, they’re in a choose your own adventure. One of those _Give Yourself Goosebumps_ stories that Sam was obsessed with for a few months when he was 13. Books where you’re given the illusion of autonomy, but ultimately doomed to wind up with one of a few predetermined endings no matter which page you turn to at the beginning. All the lines already written. All the possibilities set out in a facsimile of free choice.

Digging his fingers into the back of his neck, Dean breathes deeply, slowly, sits down on the edge of the teacher’s desk, and tries to rationalize. He’s real. _He’s real_. He defied Chuck in the graveyard. _Pick it up_ , Chuck had demanded, and Dean had refused. That’s proof. That _has to_ be proof.

And… there had been something humming under his skin, in the graveyard. Something pushing, making his muscles twitch toward the weapon he’d dropped. A pulse, an electric buzz that made him feel as though it would have been easier to just _do it_ , to do what Chuck wanted him to do. As though his hand wanted to reach out and hold the grip, his finger itching for the trigger, the gun that was made for him, molded to fit his palm. 

He’d fought it, he’d _had to_ fight it, but the feeling had been unsettlingly familiar. 

Now, he wonders now how many times he’s unwittingly let Chuck force his hand because the stakes hadn’t seemed all that high, because he hadn’t recognized that the compulsion, the anger, the righteousness was coming from someplace outside of himself.

How many times has Chuck made him act out a more dramatic plot line? Which losses were truly his own? Which victories? Which mistakes can he wholly take the blame for? 

How can he ever know how far down the manipulations go?

“Shit,” he gasps out against the back of his hand, and squeezes his eyes shut, and curses again, bites the word out through gritted teeth. “Fuck.”

A knock comes at the open classroom door a moment later, startling him out of his thoughts before he can spiral any further into what feels like an endless pit of existential dread that he’s not remotely equipped to deal with. He’s expecting to see Sam—he doubts that Cas is going to seek him out any time soon, given the barbs Dean’s been flinging at him—but as it turns out, it’s neither of them. 

A fatal combination of reflex and utter exhaustion makes him ask, “What’s the news, Jack?” without thinking. The moment the name leaves his mouth he feels a sick, slithering lurch in his gut, skin prickling hot and cold. The taste of bitter bile floods his mouth. 

To his credit, Belphegor doesn’t comment on the slip. 

Dean thinks the demon may have raised an eyebrow, but thanks to the sunglasses, it’s hard to tell. For a moment, Belphegor just stands there awkwardly and looks at him, hands hidden in the pockets of the jeans Jack had picked out for himself at a thrift store in Red Cloud after Dean had emphatically vetoed a pair of highlighter-yellow track pants.

“Your brother sent me,” Belphegor says, finally, sounding more put-upon than he has any business being. “A few of those hunters you called turned up. He’s going with them to start clearing out the bodies.”

“The bodies,” Dean repeats, slow, still a little off-kilter, and then his brain kicks back into drive. Right. Ghost-Gacy’s victims. The teenage girls Cas mentioned finding in a blood-splattered bedroom. The Sheriff, whose heart Belphegor had ripped right out of his chest while Dean watched in muted horror from six feet away. He’s still not sure how the hell they’re going to make _that_ —or any of the others, really—look like the result of a damned chemical leak, but moving them to an uncompromised location is probably a good start. He nods to himself. “Right. When are we heading out?”

“Actually… Sam said you’d be staying here. Apparently I’m ‘not allowed’ to be left on my own. Benefit of the doubt would be nice, considering I’ve been nothing but helpful since I showed up, but whatever, I get it. You’re hunters, I’m a demon. Old dogs, new tricks, yada yada yada.”

 _What about Cas_? is on the tip of Dean’s tongue, but he doesn’t voice the question. 

For one, considering the fact that Cas can’t stand to even look at Belphegor, supervising him is probably out of the question. For two, Dean’s too messed up to even think about Cas right now, let alone talk about him with the jackass demon wearing his kid. _Their_ kid. 

Jack is dead. Mom is dead. Belphegor clears his throat, impatient, and Dean wants to be sick. There’s no time.

“Okay.” Swallowing against the sour taste in his mouth, Dean pushes back to his feet. His knees pop with the movement as his whole body protests at being forced to stand again when he still hasn’t paid off the 40-something hours of sleep debt he already owes. He shakes it off. Pushes through. “Okay,” he says again, and gestures for Belphegor to lead the way. “Let’s go.”

____

In the school cafeteria, Dean discovers that while he’s been busy trying to suppress his impending meltdown, the locals have been hard at work setting up a makeshift base camp.

Camping cots and folding chairs fill the open space, and a handful of people are preparing a mountain of sandwiches and what smells like instant mac and cheese in the kitchen. Trying to look more like the seasoned professional he’s undercover as, and less as though he’s moments away from completely losing his mind, Dean glances around until he finds his brother, talking on his phone over by the window. Sam looks up as though he can sense his gaze, and Dean heads over to meet him, leaving Belphegor to his own devices by a tall stack of sandwiches.

“You should hold down the fort,” Dean says the moment Sam ends his call, and keeps right on talking when his brother looks as though he’s going to argue. “Don’t think I haven’t seen you wincing every time you’ve moved that shoulder wrong.”

“Dean, it’s—”

“It’s an injury,” Dean cuts in, “compared to my complete lack of an injury. Only makes sense for you to be the one to keep an eye on Corey Hart over there while I take care of the, uh… heavy lifting.”

Sam lifts his eyebrows at the dated reference, but doesn’t comment on it. Just says, “You do realize Cas is going to help, right? I wouldn’t actually be lifting much of anything.”

Something heavy settles in Dean’s stomach.

“Sure,” he lies.

For a long few moments, Sam studies his face as though he’s going to see something more than what’s on the surface, and Dean feels a mounting sense of dread at the thought that his brother is going to try and start psychoanalyzing him. But Sam just lets out an unsteady breath, and nods his concession.

“Fine. But you’d better stow your crap. I don’t want either of you getting killed out there because you’re too pissed at each other to do your job right.”

It’s insulting, is what it is, but Dean doesn’t rise to the bait. He puts his hand out, palm up.

“Just give me the damn keys.”

Pursing his lips, Sam passes them over, grimacing at a twinge in his shoulder from the slight movement. Dean looks at him pointedly.

“You want me to take a look at that before I head out?”

“No. Cas checked it over a few minutes ago. It’s the same as before.” Sam pauses, chewing on the inside of his lip for a moment before he seems to make up his mind about something. “He couldn’t heal it.”

The fact that Cas couldn’t do anything about it is more than a little concerning, but Dean doesn’t press Sam for more details. There’d be no point. They’re running on borrowed time as it is, and until Rowena turns up to help them with a more long-term solution than Belphegor’s makeshift barrier, he needs to focus on what they _can_ do, not on what they can’t.

“Well, we’ll figure it out when I get back. Who all showed up, anyway?”

“Jules is the only one who was close enough to get here fast.”

Dean nods, and tries not to think about the fact that the last time they’d seen her was at Mary’s wake.

“She brought a few hunters whose names I didn’t recognize—Paul, Hank, and… Jerry, I think? Phone signal was pretty shaky. They’re headed for the town centre in a warded truck. Figured we’d meet there and work our way out in pairs.”

“Makes sense.”

“I heard back from a couple others, too.” Sam pulls his cell back out of his pocket and scrolls back through his messages. “Stevie, from that wraith case in Woodbridge, and her buddy Cal. And one of Garth’s contacts—the Canadian one? Bill? They won’t get here until tomorrow, though.”

“Better late than never,” Dean says. Looking around the bustling cafeteria, he searches for any sign of a tan trench coat, but comes up with nothing.

“He’s waiting outside,” Sam tells him before Dean has to ask, and pats him on the back. Dean doesn’t bother to say anything else, lest he ends up triggering a whole other discussion. 

Keys in hand, he braces himself and heads for the door.

____

Outside, Cas is standing beside the Impala, staring out at the football field where half the town’s evacuees are watching the school team play a pick-up game against an assortment of siblings and parents in the fading daylight. They’re having fun, despite the situation. Dean figures that for most of them the town evacuation probably seems like something interesting they’ll get to tell their out-of-town friends about once it all blows over. A temporary inconvenience. Not the end of the world.

Part of Dean envies them for that. Another part pities them. 

Another part wonders if they’re even real, or just background players in Chuck’s elaborate pulp fiction saga, no more consequential than the obliviously cheerful birds singing in the trees that line the football field.

He hates that he’s had the thought at all, but he can’t stop it.

When Castiel hears him approaching, he turns, and his melancholy expression quickly fades beneath an impassive mask that Dean knows is only there as an act of self defense. It occurs to Dean that he’d probably been thinking of Jack as he watched the kids and their parents. It sets off an ache somewhere deep in Dean. He hadn’t realized he still had space for anything else to hurt, but… well. So it goes.

Jack was their kid, whether he’d started out that way or not. 

Not that long ago, Jack had been sitting in his usual seat at the map table, arguing about which pizza toppings they should order. Not that long ago, Dean had taught him to drive. He’d taken him fishing, and bought him a chocolate-cherry milkshake, and shown him how to make pancakes just right. 

Not that long ago, Cas had come to Dean’s room to tell him, grinning, that Jack had just asked Sam if he grew his hair long as a “fashion statement”, or if it was just because he liked it that way.

He was _theirs_. He lost his soul because of them, because he was trying to save them, and—

And Dean nearly killed him for it.

He’d stood there in that cemetery, his finger on the trigger, and he’d wanted to do it. A part of him had wanted to do it. He’d looked at Jack and seen nothing but another monster who’d taken his mother away—gold eyes instead of yellow—and he’d _wanted_ to do it.

Their own kid. 

Regardless of whether or not Dean can ever stop hating Jack for what he did… Cas might never forgive him for that. He wishes he could take it all back.

 _Maybe, in another universe_ — 

The thought cuts off abruptly, Dean’s mind spinning like a wheel in mud.

‘Another universe’ isn’t an abstract concept anymore, which is the truly fucked up part. He’s known for a while now that there are copies on copies on copies, but before this latest nightmare he had still been able to think of the other worlds as completely separate to their own. But now… who knows how many times Chuck has tortured him, tortured all of them, before this go around.

It’s a futile kind of wish, made ugly by the circumstances of reality as he knows it, but he has to hope that in one of those worlds, in some version of reality, they were all okay. Happy, even.

Dean’s hands ache with the need to reach out and offer Cas comfort, but still he finds himself veering into hostility. Mary is dead because Dean trusted Jack, and the only reason he ever let his guard down around the kid is standing there with a forlorn crease in his brow. 

Fighting the tide of his anger is more than Dean can manage. He ignores Cas and unlocks the car.

“Where’s Sam?” Cas asks, hesitating by the passenger door as Dean slides behind the wheel, and Dean answers automatically, feeling as though he’s only got two choices moving forward: blunt and aloof, or openly hostile.

“Not coming.”

The heavy thunk of his door is an abrupt and final end to a conversation that barely even started. Cas hesitates outside for the briefest moment, then climbs into his seat and doesn’t say another word.

As he drives them toward the town centre, Dean is no longer certain who he’s more angry with—Chuck for setting all of this in motion, or himself for being too weak to stop it. 

Beside him, Castiel’s tense silence is sign enough that no matter the intended target, the fallout of his rage is all landing in the same place.

____

There are sixteen casualties, in the end — at once too many and far less than Dean had expected.

First, they deal with the nine that they already knew about. The Sheriff with his missing heart, the two teenage girls covered in blood, and the six party guests who hadn’t managed to outrun Gacy’s ghost. But after sweeping through the town centre and the houses that spread out on either side, they find more.

A couple in their forties, drowned in their outdoor spa; a woman whose insides have slithered out through a long, deep slash from her chin to her navel; three men with burst blood vessels in their eyes and dark bruises circling their throats, and last, a guy around Claire’s age, who seems to have broken his neck falling down the stairs in his desperation to get away from whatever was chasing him.

Between Dean, Cas, Jules, and her three hunting buddies, they manage to transport all of the bodies out of the town and into a disused warehouse on the same highway as the school with minimal injury, though Jules’ friend Hank ends up with a broken thumb that Cas heals with a little more effort than Dean’s used to seeing him need to expend. Something else to worry about later, Dean thinks.

Along with Jerry, Hank volunteers to stand guard at the warehouse until they can figure out what to do about the dead civilians.

They’re finally on their way back to the high school just after midnight, Jules and Paul trailing behind them in her clunky old Ford pickup, when Dean realizes he’s barely said a word since sundown.

Cas had done most of the talking when they first met up with the others, going over the plan that Sam had already hashed out with him in detail, and though they’d split back into pairs after that, everything had run more or less on autopilot. Dean loaded and reloaded his shotgun, repelling ghosts and clearing buildings without more than the occasional shout of _duck_ , or _look out_ , or _on your right_. Cas had followed his lead, and never attempted anything even approaching a conversation.

“When we get back—” Dean starts now, and Cas flinches at the broken silence. Dean swallows around the lump that the reaction instantly puts in his throat, and starts again. “When we get back, I need you to check out Sam’s shoulder again.”

“Of course,” Cas says.

“He said you already tried, but—”

“I’ll keep trying.”

“Good.”

There’s a heavy pause, as though Cas is weighing up whether or not to say something more, and Dean is so used to this kind of moment leading nowhere that he’s shocked when Cas speaks.

“I noticed an energy. In the wound,” he says, and Dean gets the strange impression that the words took a lot of effort to force out. Once he’s started, though, the rest flows like whisky from an open bottle. “It’s unlike anything I’ve encountered before, and I don’t know whether it’s residual energy from the weapon that caused it, or if it’s just my powers waning, but when I tried to heal it… it was as though the wound was throwing my grace back at me. Like a mirror, or an echo, or… I don’t know how to describe it. I’ll try again, but we may have to look into alternatives if I can’t fix it. I meant to tell you earlier, but…”

Cas trails off, frowning, and shakes his head.

“Yeah, there’s always something,” Dean says. He means it to come out in commiseration, but somehow it sounds accusatory, and in an instant the atmosphere in the Impala is as tense as it ever was. Dean feels pressure like a fist closed around his windpipe. He doesn’t know how to take it back.

Cas stares at him for a moment before he looks away again, his throat working in a stiff swallow.

The school is quiet when they arrive a few minutes later, nothing but the sounds of a few restless sleepers and one older woman with an intermittent rattling snore to break the silence. A young deputy that Dean vaguely recognizes from earlier in the day is sitting on a folding chair by the door. When she sees them she stands and gestures for them to follow her into the corridor.

“Deputy Hayley Kim,” she says, sticking out her hand for Jules and Paul to shake. “You the EPA agents?”

“Backup from the home office,” Dean tells her before they have to come up with anything else, and the Deputy’s face falls in what he assumes is disappointment that the crisis isn’t getting sorted out any time soon.

“We just wrapped up a case down in Wichita,” Jules tells the deputy smoothly. “Heard you might need some help keeping things in order around here while this mess gets sorted.”

“Yeah, we might do in the morning. Folks were already getting restless before sundown,” Deputy Kim says with a glance back into the cafeteria before she looks back at Dean and drops her voice a little lower. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen the Sheriff? He hasn’t been answering his phone.”

“He’s camped out by the roadblock on the other side of town. Left a couple other agents with him.”

“Good, I’ll let his wife know,” she says, and Dean feels guilt over the lie like a physical weight dropped onto his shoulders. It’s honestly a wonder that he still has the capacity to feel more of it. Before he can dwell too long, the deputy yawns, wide, and cracks her neck. “We set up some extra cots for you in the classrooms back there if you need to crash a while.”

Dean’s focus is slipping, so with a nod he excuses himself and heads toward the classrooms the deputy had gestured toward, leaving her to talk with the others.

He pretends not to notice that way Cas stares after him like he thinks he’s leaving for good. 

____

Sam’s snoring in the first room he glances into, his long legs contorted awkwardly to fit onto the folding cot he’s set up beside the window. The handle of his demon knife is just visible under the thin pillow, Sam’s hand wrapped tightly around it even in sleep. Closer to the door, Belphegor is sitting cross-legged on another cot. His head is tilted back against the wall, and though it’s impossible to tell for certain given the state of his eyes, Dean’s pretty sure that he hasn’t been seen. On the floor beneath the cot, Dean can make out the distinct shape of a devil’s trap.

Satisfied that Sam is safe, and unwilling to subject himself to any level of interaction with the demon beyond what’s strictly necessary to get the job done, Dean heads for the next room, where another two cots have been set up. He collapses onto the first one he reaches fully dressed, unwilling to even take off his boots, just in case Chuck decides to throw something else at them overnight.

In the dark quiet, with nothing to distract him or demand his attention, it’s impossible to keep himself from latching back onto his earlier train of thought, and within minutes he’s gone from barely conscious to wide awake, staring at the popcorn ceiling of the empty classroom and thinking. Analyzing. Cataloguing every thought and feeling he can identify, and inspecting each one for proof that it’s really his, and not just some malignant seed left there by Chuck to make his favorite show a little more interesting.

It doesn’t take long for his thoughts to turn to Cas.

They spent seven hours working side by side tonight, and right now he’s only a room or two away, but Dean misses him. Misses the idea of him, maybe. Of what they’d been before.

Of what they could have been, if Dean had ever given them half a chance.

They’d had some downtime last year, and Dean had thought—a few times when they’d been talking over beers in the library, or once on a drive to pick up supplies in Red Cloud, when Cas had been sitting beside him in the Impala, his hand splayed out like an invitation on the seat between them— _I should do it now_.

He’d looked at Cas, and thought that maybe it was finally time. Time to take the risk he’s been calculating odds on for the better part of a decade.

But every time, the bravery came and went like a shifting tide, rising up to cover his chest for the briefest of moments before receding. So every time, he’d just let it go. Maybe not now, he’d decide, but next time. _Soon_. 

Soon never came, though. 

Soon was cut off before it could arrive, blocked by crisis after crisis after crisis, and Dean had put it on the back-burner, replaced _soon_ with _someday_ , with _after things are stable_ , with _maybe it’s too risky, after all_.

He wonders if things would be different now if he’d actually followed his reckless instincts. If he’d touched the tips of Cas’ fingers on the bench seat the way he’d wanted to. If he’d knocked the beer bottle away from Cas’ mouth and pressed his own lips there, curled his palm around the back of his neck and breathed him in.

If he’d broken the silence, just once, to tell Cas _hey, maybe we should give this a shot._

He’s still not really sure what stopped him the last time, or the time before, or the dozen times before that. 

He’s been scared in his life more often than not, but with everything else, he’s pushed ahead anyway. This, though. The thing with him and Cas has always felt impossible, despite the fact that he’s 99% sure he’s not on his own. After all, there’s only so many times that you can see someone choose you, personally, over literal Heaven before it becomes clear that there’s some deep feeling there.

But something has always stopped him. 

Sometimes, it was something external; an interruption just as he was gearing up to speak. More often than not, though, it was… something else. A pressure in the throat. A feeling that it wasn’t right, even while he felt otherwise certain that it was.

 _Chuck_ , he thinks suddenly, with startling clarity.

The twisted asshole probably thought that Dean falling for Cas but always being too chickenshit to do anything about it would make for a compelling sideplot. Really, it would explain a hell of a lot. He’s seen telenovela leads with less tortured relationships than what he and Cas have.

Of course, that presents the problem of whether or not he can trust his feelings for the guy at all. Especially considering the fact that if Dean didn’t love Cas, he would never have grown to love Jack, and his mom would still be alive and kicking.

With his skin crawling and his chest aching, Dean turns onto his side and tries to keep himself from listening for the approach of Cas’ footsteps coming up the hall. He honestly doesn’t know whether the sick squirm in his stomach is hope or dread.

He’s terrified that even if he can determine which of his thoughts and feelings and actions are his own, he has no way of knowing anyone else's. He’s terrified, because maybe Sam leaving him behind for Stanford was the only real choice his brother ever really made. He’s terrified, because he can’t know if Cas ever truly chose him over Heaven, or if Chuck just thought it would make for a bit of added drama.

Because the thing is this: he’s never understood _why_ Cas likes him at all.

He’s nothing. He’s a dropout, a deadbeat, a worthless mess of high-functioning alcoholism and anger-management issues and bad jokes, and he knows it. The idea that an angel could ever look at him and see anything worth giving up his wings for has never made a lick of sense to Dean.

Chuck wanting to make them all suffer, though? That makes sense. That makes all the sense in the world.

Five hours later, Cas remains conspicuously absent, and Dean still hasn’t slept a wink.

It’s tempting to just give up. To just resign himself to hopelessness and just lie here until Chuck snaps his fingers and ends it all. _What’s the fucking point?_ he wonders. But then his phone buzzes against his hip, and he digs it out to see a message from Rowena. 

_About an hour away, darlin. Where shall I direct my driver?_

Rubbing at his tired eyes, he taps out directions and receives a dancing woman emoji in return.

He tells himself he’s looking for Sam when he heads out into the school grounds shortly after. It’s a lie, of course. It’s barely after five in the morning, and he never even checked the classroom where his brother had been sleeping last night.

The grounds are quiet. In a semi-enclosed courtyard attached to the teachers lounge, a handful of neighborhood dogs are sleeping, curled up in travel crates and at the ends of leashes. Dean finds Cas among them, lit up by dim moonlight.

He’s crouched down beside a scraggly little terrier whose stubby tail is wagging frantically as she sniffs and licks at Cas’s knuckles. With his heart aching, Dean watches Cas smiling at her for a few moments before he finally clears his throat, and Cas looks up, startled. Dean wonders how he managed to sneak up on a guy with angelic super hearing.

“Nothing more important to do?” he asks, and immediately hates himself for it.

He hates that he keeps doing this. Lashing out, hurting Cas and pushing him away when Dean just wants him to be okay, to be happy. To stay.

The pressure in his throat is back. He’s too tired to fight against it.

“Everyone is sleeping,” Cas says after a few uncomfortable seconds, and stands up, dusting himself off for no real reason Dean can see. “Did something happen?”

“Rowena texted. She’s almost here.”

He doesn’t elaborate or wait to see if Cas is following him; just turns and heads back inside to wake Sam.

____

Rowena is waiting when they reach the edge of Belphegor’s barrier forty minutes later, her hands perched on her hips as she stares down a rapidly growing number of ghosts on the other side. As usual, she’s wildly overdressed for the occasion. As usual, she has an expression on her face that suggests that, in fact, it’s everybody else who’s failed to live up to her sartorial expectations.

“What on Earth have you boys gotten yourselves into now?”

“Hell sprung a leak. Kinda hoping you’ll be able to plug it.”

Rowena wrinkles her nose.

“Do I look like a plumber to you?”

Castiel squints, very clearly about to ask what a plumber should look like, while Dean’s ready to tell her what to do with her snarky bullshit. Sam cuts in before either of them have the chance.

“Rowena. Please.” 

His eyes are pleading, his tone soft. Sam’s been strangely gentle with Rowena for a while now, and when he’s got the time to spare, Dean’s going to give that the analysis it deserves. For now, though— 

“Can you help us or not?” Dean asks her. Rowena lifts her chin high as though she’s insulted that he even asked.

“I assure you darlin’, there’s very little I _cannot_ do, given the proper motivation,” she says, then falters, mouth tense as she glances back past the barrier to where the ghosts are amassing like a vast, spectral army. “That said, patching up a hole in Hell isn’t the kind of thing I’ll be able to just throw together.”

Dean rolls his eyes.

“Wait—” Sam lifts a hand, still working on an idea but evidently needing quiet while he checks it over for feasibility. It only takes a few seconds before he’s nodding to himself. “Back when we were dealing with Amara—you made a bomb.”

“Aye,” Rowena says, eyes narrowing. “But what does that—”

“Could you do it again?”

“You want to blow up the ghosts?” Rowena asks, her tone arch enough to make the whole situation seem a little less dire, just for a moment, and Sam almost laughs. Dean just frowns harder, wondering where the hell his brother is going with this.

Sam shakes his head, and it only takes half a second for Rowena to realize what he’s saying. Her eyes widen.

“Sam, it took everything I had to draw those ghosts into the crystal.”

“But you did it,” he says, encouraging. “You can do it again. We can trap them.”

“Trap them?” Dean repeats. “Really?”

“It could work,” Cas says, though there’s a hint of concern creasing his brow. “But what would we do with the crystal afterwards?”

Sam just shrugs.

“Curse box? Hell, we could throw it in the Ma’lek box and fill it with cement. But we can figure that out later.” He glances at Rowena again, and shuffles on his feet. “Assuming you’ll do it, that is.”

With pursed lips, Rowena stares at him for a long moment before she finally nods.

“I’ll need help,” she adds, but Sam is poised and ready.

“Just tell me what you need.”

____

The spell is complicated, the list of ingredients long, and as a result, they’re faced with several hours of downtime during which there’s nothing to do but wait and avoid a barrage of increasingly impatient questions from local law enforcement.

Dean figures they have until the end of the day at the latest before the deputy stops accepting their story and goes looking for the sheriff herself.

He spends a solid chunk of the early morning patrolling the perimeter of the town with Belphegor before they give up and head back to the school around nine. If Dean’s being honest with himself, his suggestion that they go check up on Rowena’s progress is nothing more than a thinly veiled excuse to get away from the demon whose mannerisms and expressions are all horrifically wrong on Jack’s familiar face.

When they get back to the school, Stevie and Cal have arrived, and are huddled with Sam in the room he’d used last night, talking strategy. Cas is nowhere to be seen. 

Dean wanders the halls, uncertain whether he’s looking for Cas or avoiding him, and eventually finds Rowena instead, sitting with her legs crossed in one of the science classrooms and touching up her lipstick in a compact mirror. She hasn’t even started the spell.

Not even trying to mask her irritation at being hurried, she shows Dean the list of items she’s still waiting on—a few uncommon herbs and crystals, and several magical items that he’d need an hour and a multi-language dictionary to understand the shape and purpose of—and makes the not-remotely-reassuring comment that even once she has everything on hand, there’s no guarantee that it’s actually going to work in time.

He ditches her when she gets a call from one of her spell-related suppliers, and regrets it almost immediately when Cas comes to find him killing time in the school coach’s office.

That pressure in his throat is back. The part of him that exists on a hair trigger, poised and ready to defend him from an enemy that doesn’t exist.

He’s exhausted by it. Tired beyond any definition he could even describe. The thought of pushing Cas away and testing the strength of their relationship against the pressure of Chuck’s interference goes against everything that he wants, everything that he needs to stay at least relatively sane, but it’s like he’s stuck on a track that he can’t climb off of. 

It doesn’t help that Cas still seems so intent on pretending that they’ve had any say at all in their lives until now. Dean can’t stand it. Somehow, it just cuts deeper, to know that Cas is still even remotely convinced by the story. The big lie.

“You asked what about all of this is real?” Cas says, his voice verging on desperate. “ _We_ are.”

The words hit Dean like a kick in the chest. Too much. It’s all too damn much. Dean leaves the room and doesn’t look back. He can’t. Not if he’s got any hope of dealing with any of this. 

It’s almost funny when in his attempt to get as far away from Cas as possible he pushes through a random door and finds himself in the foyer of the school library, face to face with a pinboard covered in book reviews. His eyes are immediately drawn to one on the left for Vonnegut’s _Timequake_. 

It’s _almost_ funny, only he’s never been so furious in his life.

“Fuck off,” he says aloud, just in case Chuck can hear him, and tears the paper down. 

He leaves it in shreds on the foyer floor.

____

When Rowena finally finishes putting the spell together a little before noon, it works, _technically_ , but it’s a lot like trying to soak up flood water with a dish sponge.

After a hectic whirlwind of activity—Kevin’s brief and painful return, Ketch showing up to be a vaguely useful pain in the ass before being possessed and hospitalized, and another couple of civilians wandering back into the town against all rationality and getting themselves unceremoniously slaughtered—they’re right back where they started.

Standing in the street, they watch with creeping dread as ghost after ghost after ghost hurtles out of Hell and slams into the barrier with an electric flash of red energy.

“The barrier’s not going to hold much longer,” Belphegor says, as if none of them had realized what was happening, and rocks back on his heels. “Hope one of you has a back up plan, because I’m fresh out of ideas.”

Dean’s got nothing. He looks around at the others, all staring up at the sky with matching expressions of hopelessness, and knows that they’re screwed. More than usual.

“We’ll figure it out,” Sam says anyway, and Dean can’t help but shake his head.

“How?” he asks.

He’s not surprised when nobody answers.

_____

That afternoon, they gather in the courtyard with the dogs of Harlan, and try to come up with plan B.

Jules, Paul, Stevie, and Cal all look exhausted from the morning’s fight, and though Bill had arrived too late to take part in the action, his face is set in a tense frown.

In the center of the courtyard, Cas leans heavily against a weathered oak with his arms crossed, studiously averting his gaze from the place behind Dean where Belphegor is standing.

Beside him, Sam has his cell phone on speaker, keeping Jerry and Hank in the loop, while Rowena sits primly on the edge of a picnic table, looking for all the world like someone who made a drastically wrong turn on her way to some red carpet event.

“First things first,” Dean says, rubbing at his stinging eyes with both hands. “We’ve gotta come up with something new to tell people. Deputy Kim is getting suspicious, and I don’t think the Sheriff’s wife is really buying that he’s just too busy to pick up the phone.”

For an uncomfortably long moment, there’s nothing but silence as they all look at one another, hoping someone has even the slightest hint of an idea. When nobody else speaks, Rowena purses her lips and raises one elegantly manicured hand.

“I could… distr _act_ them,” she suggests with a meaningful wriggle of her fingers. Dean shoots her a sharp look.

“No.”

“I’m not saying I’ll hurt the poor dears,” she says, offended. “Just… a harmless little _disteneo_ charm to keep them preoccupied and out of harm's way. A wee bit of yarrow and bergamot, a simple incantation, and they won’t have a care in the world.”

It’s tempting, but Dean shakes his head on principle.

“Last resort,” Sam says diplomatically.

“Suit yourself. But I don’t hear anyone else suggesting anything.”

As much as he hates to admit it, she’s right. Dean can already see Sam’s phone in his hand, running a search on one of the occult sites they use, but he’s not ready to throw in the _no-spells-on-civilians_ towel yet.

“C’mon, someone’s gotta have something.”

He looks around at the others, and is met with little more than helpless shrugs and frowns. Jules looks as though she has an idea for a half a second, then shakes her head.

Dean can’t really blame them. This isn’t just a handful of people they need to keep on lock, after all—it’s a whole damn town. Short of cuffing the lot of them to the high school’s fence, there’s not a whole lot that they can do to keep them from wandering back into town once they really get tired of waiting. 

And they can’t even do that, he realizes—not even the Sheriff’s office would have that many sets of handcuffs in storage.

Sighing, he resigns himself to doing what has to be done and looks back at Rowena.

“I guess you’re on,” he says, then claps his hands on his knees and shifts on his seat. “Now. Anyone have any ideas for the ghosts or the hell hole they crawled out of?”

This time, when another long moment of silence results in Rowena being the only one to raise her hand, Dean doesn’t bother to argue.

_____

The charm works like a—well. It works exactly as it’s supposed to. 

Within moments of Rowena setting it in motion, a ripple of purple energy rolls along the ground, and every last person whose left hand isn’t marked with the anti-charm symbol is rendered as malleable as clay.

Belphegor herds them all into the library like an overexcited sheepdog, and Rowena follows behind with the measured pace of a queen to give them their instructions: _read quietly until you’re tired, sleep, and then read some more in the morning_. The spell will wear off naturally after twenty-four hours. They won’t even need to lock the door to keep them here.

“Don’t forget to tell them they should use the restroom if they need to,” Bill calls urgently after her, and Rowena wrinkles her nose as she glances back, but nods all the same.

“Close call,” Dean says.

“I got hit with _disteneo_ last summer,” Bill says with a shudder, and Dean decides quickly that whatever story Bill is about to start telling him, he’s really not in the mood to hear it.

“That’s uh… that’s rough, man,” Dean says, and gestures vaguely over his shoulder. “Hey, I just gotta—”

Bill nods, thankfully not too concerned by Dean’s weak excuse to leave, and Dean heads down the corridor to the front of the school.

Rowena’s plan for tomorrow, an old Italian strengthening spell she refers to as _rafforza l’incantesimo,_ requires several hours of overnight preparation (“In _private_ , if you don’t mind,” she’d said, “I don’t care to be skyclad in front of just anyone.”) along with a handful of ingredients that won’t arrive until morning, so with the townspeople preoccupied there’s really nothing left to do but wait and hope that Belphegor’s failing barrier will hold long enough for them to make it permanent.

Quietly, Dean slips out through the front door and across the parking lot, heading for the bleachers on the far side of the football field. Out here, the air feels clearer. Less stifling. 

The trees beyond the school grounds shield the electric-red flash of the ghost barrier from view, and the only sound for miles is the breeze and the song of those same cheerful birds he noticed yesterday. They sing as they flit from branch to branch, and as he climbs the bleachers he listens to them. Almost envies them for their carefree lives.

Shaking his head slightly—being envious of birds is probably a sign that he’s finally cracked in some irreparable way—Dean lets himself sink onto one of the metal bench seats with a groan. His limbs ache. His entire body aches.

To put it bluntly, he’s felt like absolute shit all day. 

At his best guess, he’s gotta be pushing 60 hours without sleep at this point. That can’t be good for anyone, and it’s sure as hell catching up to him.

Sleep deprivation, he remembers reading once, is often used as torture. People lose their minds. Internal processes go into overdrive and then shut down; the brain starts to misfire, making people see things that aren’t there. Tricks them into imagining phantom sights and sounds and slights that make them fly off the handle for no good reason or retreat into themselves in terror.

All in all, it’s really nothing new for someone like him. He’s well versed in fear and phantom visions, and the anger thing… well, that’s not something he’s ever been short on. And definitely not now.

Still, he hasn’t gone this long without sleep since Purgatory, and that’s not something he wants to think about. The last thing he needs is for his internal organs to give out halfway through saving the world because he didn’t bother to catch four hours of shut eye when he had the chance.

Lying down along the seat, Dean closes his eyes and braces one arm across his face to block out the late afternoon sun. The angel blade he’s carrying in the back of his jeans digs into his hip, and he grunts in discomfort before he shifts it to his jacket’s inside pocket. Letting himself get some actual sleep may be a pipe dream right now with everything that’s piling on his shoulders, but he can rest. 

For a little while, he can rest.

_____

The sound of slow footsteps crunching over dry grass pulls him from his doze a couple of hours later, and his adrenaline spikes, pushing him to his feet with his blade in his hand before he’s even fully opened his eyes. Blinking blearily, he stares down at the football field below.

The grass is awash in the pink and gray light of dusk, a few birds swooping low to catch bugs. Around the forty yard line, Cas is paused halfway through a stride, looking up at him.

Dean gets the distinct impression that he hadn’t expected to encounter anyone out here.

For a seemingly endless moment, they just look at one another, neither willing to make a move in either direction, but then Castiel comes to some decision and squares his shoulders before continuing in his approach. Dean sits back down and pockets the blade.

It seems to take forever for Cas to climb the stairs. When he finally reaches Dean’s level, he sits down on the other side of the walkway and leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. His fingers twine around one another in a strange, nervous gesture that is far too distracting for Dean to deal with.

He’s noticed that Cas has been doing that sort of thing more, lately. Leaning, sitting, fixing his hair in the rearview. Little things. Human things. Dean’s also been trying _not to_ notice it for a while, and right now… well. Cas doesn’t get to be human right now, and Dean sure as hell doesn’t get to enjoy watching him. There’s no time for this. They have work to do.

“I checked Sam’s shoulder again,” Cas says without preamble, Dean lifts his eyes from where they were fixed on his hands.

“Any change?”

Shaking his head, Castiel looks out over the football field.

“It’s still not healing, but it’s not any worse. I suppose that’s a small comfort.”

“Mm.”

“Though… it might be worth trying some other avenues of healing, once we’ve dealt with Hell. I can’t be certain that my powers aren’t the issue.”

They fall silent, and Dean doesn’t look at him. He can’t. He wants to ask Cas if he’s okay; wants to talk to him about this mess they’re in, losing Mom, losing Jack, his waning powers, how fucking hopeless this all feels and how much he needs to know that they’re all still in this together.

But deep in his chest, he can feel his anger bubbling up, waiting for an excuse to burst out in a toxic wave, and knows he’s too tired to fight it. Better to just keep quiet and hope Cas walks away without saying anything else.

He should know better than to hope by now.

“I’m not sure why, but healing even the most minor injuries has been becoming more and more difficult lately,” Castiel’s voice is hesitant, like he’s sorry to be the bearer of more bad news, and it only makes Dean angrier. “Even fixing Hank’s thumb last night was almost too much. It’s as though my grace is—”

“Really not interested in your pity party, Cas,” he hears himself snap, and pushes to his feet. “Figure it out. I’m heading inside.”

There’s a particular kind of silence that’s as loud as a slammed door. As Dean walks away from Castiel for the third time in the past two days, the silence that trails after him is enough to make his ears ring.

_____

At the cemetery in the morning, the stench of decay is thick enough to make Dean gag. The bodies that crawled from their graves when Chuck pulled the plug have been rotting in the sun for two days, and as they pick their way between corpses and headstones, headed for the crypt where Rowena will cast her spell, Dean has the depressing realization that they’re going to have to clean up this mess, too.

Inside the crypt, breathing is a little easier. It's musty with old leaves and dust, but the thick stone walls have kept it relatively free of the miasma that permeates the air outside. They set up the spell quickly. For a moment, it seems as though it’s working.

Rowena chants the words, and her eyes glow, and the air seems to crackle with power as she sends energy out toward the barrier—but then something splinters. Shatters. The spell breaks, bursting out from her hands in an arc of violet fire, and Rowena hits the floor like a puppet whose strings have been cut.

“We’re all going to die,” she says, and as much as Dean wants to pretend otherwise, he believes her. So does Belphegor, if his sudden departure is anything to go by.

With nothing else to do, he heads for a dark corner and loads salt shells into a bandolier to keep his hands busy. If he stops, he’ll punch the wall. He doesn't want to find out whether Cas’ diminished powers are strong enough to heal broken knuckles.

“Hey. What are you doing?”

Sam’s got his concerned face on when he sits down beside Dean, and Dean can’t bring himself to face him for more than a glance. He keeps loading shells. Directs his response to the crypt, to the dark, to the cosmic peeping Tom whose entire existence seems focused on screwing with them.

“I’m not gonna give up. That’s what I’m doing,” he says, checking over his work to make sure that not a single shell is loose. “I’m not gonna just sit here and wait for the walls to come down.”

 _I’m not gonna give up_ , is what he says, but when Cas drags Belphegor back into the crypt, and they all agree to the demon’s half-baked plan, it sure as hell feels like it.

_____

Dean knows they’re screwed the second the noise stops.

One moment, the air filled with sound and fury, the sky swarming with angry spirits, screaming as they’re dragged down through the ruptured earth and into Hell, and the next—nothing.

Rocks and dirt are still tumbling into the pit as its walls slowly cave in, but Cas isn’t back yet, and there’s no way that all of Hell’s souls have returned in such a short time. 

Still, as Dean watches, he can see that the ground is sealing back up, healing over like a scab. Something is wrong. The air tastes toxic. Metallic. Ashy. He wants to be sick.

Sam calls him, but he’s distracted, and he ends the call without really saying anything at all. Crouching behind a headstone at the edge of Hell, Dean stares down at the crumbling earth and tries to keep it together.

It doesn’t escape his notice that he’d sent Cas away with barely a thought. _Yeah, Cas’ll go,_ he’d said, but now… watching his way back collapse in onto itself, he feels numb. If he gets trapped down there, if his way back is gone—

 _Come on_ , _Cas_ , he thinks, eyes darting from one end of the fissure to the other. _Where are you?_

He’s not expecting the voice to come from behind him.

“Dean.”

Pushing to his feet, Dean turns to find Cas out of breath and wounded.

“Cas! What the hell happened?”

Cas doesn’t answer, not aloud, but his face says _nothing good._ There’s blood on his lips; more running down his ear. Dean can’t tell if it’s his or someone else's, and it’s only when he’s trying to figure that out that he notices the demon’s absence.

“Where’s Belphegor?”

“I killed him.”

“You did _what_? What—what about the crook?”

“It’s gone. It was destroyed.”

“ _What_?”

There’s a haunted look in Castiel’s eyes, and it only grows worse the more he speaks, the more he tells Dean about what happened—Belphegor’s scheme to take over, how he’d tried to pull all the power of every twisted soul into himself. How he’d tried to manipulate Cas into sparing him by impersonating Jack.

“Cas, this was our only shot,” Dean hears himself saying as if from miles away. His throat is dry. Panic rising, giving way to anger, always anger. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“He was deceiving us, Dean. If I hadn’t killed him—”

“We would’ve figured it out, Cas.”

“Dean—” Cas’ voice is broken, but whatever he was planning to say next fades to nothing as the screaming spirits return en masse, rushing past them and flocking toward the crypt. Toward Rowena.

She’s walking with her arms spread wide—not quite stumbling, but unsteady—and there’s a glowing cloud of souls swirling around her, within her, growing brighter with every spirit that she absorbs. 

Behind her, Sam follows, dazed. There’s blood on his sleeves. Blood on Rowena’s dress.

Rowena walks past them with fearful purpose, and looks back at them with a smile. She looks almost rapturous. Beatific. Like this is a moment to savor, and not the moment of death.

“Goodbye, boys,” she says, and falls into Hell.

Bizarrely, that feels like the final straw.

_____

The drive home to the bunker takes all of thirty-two minutes. Dean spends every last one of them with his fingers so tense around the wheel that his hands cramp. There’s dirt under his nails, leftover from the hours-long clean up in the cemetery, and the heavy fetor of death clings to him.

He feels sick. Like there’s something toxic rolling in his chest, clawing in the pit of his gut, slowly killing him.

Beside him in the passenger seat, Sam is quiet, staring at his feet in the footwell as if the effort of lifting his head is too much. Dean doesn’t turn on the radio. Some twisted part of him wants them both to stew in it. The silence. The mess. The failure, even though they technically succeeded.

At some point, Cas overtook the Impala in his shitty truck. 

Dean can see him up ahead, pulling into the last gas station before they reach Lebanon. His left brake light is dim. _Gotta fix that for him_ , Dean thinks, and the thought gives him whiplash.

The Impala’s tank is running low, but Dean doesn’t stop. Doesn’t want to give himself the opportunity to rip into Cas again, and he hates it, but he knows it’s going to happen. He can feel it. That same toxic feeling, leeching bile into his blood and venom onto his tongue.

He presses his foot down on the accelerator and speeds past the Gas-N-Sip. He doesn’t ease up after they pass. 

Back at the bunker, Sam slams the door when he gets out of the Impala. He makes a beeline for the bathroom, already unbuttoning the blood-stained flannel before he’s made it all the way out of the garage. Dean won’t be surprised if he never sees him in that shirt again.

As soon as he hears the bathroom door close, Dean retreats to the dungeon. He hates it in here, so it’s the last place anyone’s going to come looking for him, and he just needs quiet. Solitude. 

Five fucking minutes to just—

His cell rings, and Dean barks out a helpless laugh.

It’s Stevie, according to the caller ID. Dean stares at the screen until it stops flashing at him, then keeps staring until it pings with a voicemail alert.

_“Hey Dean, it’s Stevie. Just checking in. Rowena’s charm is starting to wear off, so we’re getting ready to leave. But, uh… look, call me back when you get a chance. Got some news from Bill, but I’d rather not leave it in a message.”_

____

Dean sleepwalks through the next four hours, his mind's eye cycling endlessly between horrors. Mary dead. Jack’s eyes burning out. Chuck smirking. Rowena falling into the pit.

One after another, again and again and again.

At some point, Cas gets home, and Dean avoids him for as long as he can. He showers. He goes outside to call Stevie back, and she tells him that Ketch was killed. With everything else that's happened, that piece of news barely even registers.

“It’s over,” he tells Sam when he goes to deliver the message. “God threw one last apocalypse at us, and we beat it.”

Sam doesn’t seem convinced. 

Honestly, Dean isn’t either. This victory, such as it is, feels hollow. Superficial. This isn't even close to over. He can feel it in his gut. The other shoe’s gonna drop, any day now, and all of this—everything they’ve been through, all the blood and sweat and tears—will have been for nothing. But he puts on a brave face for Sam, because that's what he does. It's what he has to do.

He can't hold it, though. Not for long. Sam is barely looking at him, but Dean knows that once he does, he'll see where the cracks are forming. So he leaves him alone, and heads for the library to fight the rising fear with the first bottle he can find.

When Cas steps into his view shortly after, he hits the point of no return.

“How's Sam?”

Swallowing a mouthful of whisky, Dean clenches his teeth before he answers. “Not great.”

Standing on the other side of the table, Cas nods, and looks at the floor.

“Sorry about Rowena.”

He wants to tell Cas to leave him alone. To let him sit with everything that’s happened this past week and wrap his head around it. Give him time. Give him space. But Cas seems determined to talk it out now, and the black hole of rage in Dean’s chest is still there, seething. He can’t seem to keep from feeding it.

“You're sorry? Why didn't you just stick to the damn plan?”

“Belphegor was lying.”

“Belphegor was a demon.”

“He was using us,” Cas tells him. “He wanted to eat every last soul to take over Hell, Earth, and everything.”

“Yeah, and we would've figured it out! After!” Dean spits back. “ _With_ Rowena.”

“The plan changed, Dean. Something went wrong. You know this. Something always goes wrong.”

Dean knows he’s right, but his ears are ringing, and his vision is clouded, and he’s so damn angry that he can’t think straight.

“Yeah? Why does that something always seem to be you?”

Cas recoils as though he’s been struck, and guilt floods through Dean like poison. He knows he’s crossed a line, but he can’t take the words back. 

“You used to trust me. Give me the benefit of the doubt. Now… you can barely look at me. My powers are failing, and— and I've tried to talk to you, over and over, and you just don't want to hear it. You don't care, I’m—” his voice catches, and Dean’s chest clenches, but he can’t speak. Can’t argue. “I’m dead to you. You still blame me for Mary.”

Dean nods, because he’s right. He does. He blames himself, too, but that’s not something he can look at directly. Not yet. Maybe not ever. He thinks Cas knows that, but he can’t bring himself to ask. Can’t seem to say anything to him that isn’t intended to hurt.

If Cas’ face is any indication, it looks as though he’s given up trying.

“Well, I don't think there's anything left to say.”

Turning, Cas heads for the stairs, and Dean finds his voice again.

“Where you going?”

Under his coat, Cas’ entire body seems to sag.

“Jack's dead. Chuck's gone. You and Sam have each other,” Cas turns back, but he doesn’t meet Dean’s eyes. “I think it's time for me to move on.”

 _Move on from what?_ Dean wants to ask. _What am I to you?_

But Cas leaves, and Dean is a coward. He doesn’t fight. Doesn’t follow. His throat twitches, and his heart thuds, and the bunker door closes softly, like Cas doesn’t even have the energy left to slam it. 

Dean drinks until the whisky stops burning.

_____

It’s almost ten in the evening when Sam emerges from his room.

Dean hears him coming and ducks out of sight before he can be seen. It’s beyond childish, but he can’t face his brother right now.

Inevitably, Sam will ask, “Where’s Cas?”

Inevitably, Dean will have to tell him the truth—that Cas left. That Cas, for all intents and purposes, _left him_ , or whatever the equivalent phrase would be for the mess that was their relationship. Friendship. Whatever.

Dean has always struggled to define what they have— _had_ —and he’s given up on trying. He figures it doesn’t matter anymore, anyway. 

It was all a manipulation, in the end. 

Cas leaving now is proof of that—almost immediately after Chuck cut the strings, off he went, out the door with barely a glance behind him.

“ _I think it's time for me to move on._ ”

Point is, he's too drunk for Sam to confront him right now. He doesn't trust himself.

So, out of sight, his back to the wall in the alcove with the telescope they never use, Dean holds his breath and waits for his brother to walk away. He waits, and he waits, and finally hears his footsteps retreating. The high-pitched squeak of the fridge door follows shortly after, and then, a minute or two after that, the hush- _snick_ of Sam’s bedroom door clicking sharply shut.

Dean stays where he is. He feels like an idiot. 

He wants to break something, or scream, or throw up, but at the same time—he can’t. He just feels hollowed out and foolish, and overwhelmingly like he should have realized that this was coming. It never made sense that Cas should choose them—choose him—over Heaven, and now it’s crystal clear that he didn’t. He was being coerced the whole time.

Guided by the unseen hand of God.

Sinking down to sit in the narrow space, Dean grips the bottle in his hand. Drains the last of it as he tries to stop picturing the look on Cas’ face before he left. He doesn’t succeed.

Because yeah, maybe Cas was originally engineered by Chuck as nothing but a plot device, but maybe… maybe he wasn’t. Maybe it’s just like Cas said all those years ago, when Chuck had told him _“you’re not in this story.”_

Maybe they've all been defying him, in small ways, for years. Maybe they’ve been making it up as they go.

And maybe that’s the key.

Dean's heart lurches, sick with the thought. Because whether or not Chuck intended for Cas to be nothing but a tool for him to manipulate, Cas has been defying his true plan all along. He's been the metaphorical spanner in the works of God. And now Dean’s pushed him away. Beat him down so thoroughly that he couldn’t take it anymore and left.

Dean drops the bottle. The sound of it rolling across the floor echoes in the quiet.

_____

In the end, it takes three days for Sam to start asking questions. It’s longer than Dean expected, but still too soon.

The knock at his door frame is perfunctory at best. Sam’s knuckles are still resting against it when he pushes the door open and sticks his head inside. Dean glances up from the book that he hasn’t so much been reading as staring at, exhausted and somewhere between drunk and hungover--it's hard to say, given his habits over the past few days. “Have you spoken to Cas?”

“No.”

Sam makes a low sound, a concerned little hum, but Dean doesn’t elaborate. Just returns his gaze to the book.

“It’s just… I called him yesterday,” Sam says after a moment. “Phone went straight to voicemail, and he didn’t call back. Then this morning I sent him two texts, and… nothing. Did he say where he was going?”

“No.”

Frowning, Sam pushes the door further open.

“Did something happ—”

“He said he was leaving. That’s all. I’m not his keeper.” Dean lifts the book and wriggles it in the air. “You mind?”

The look Sam gives him is proof enough that his attempt at feigned indifference to the topic is about as convincing as the Federal Bikini Inspector badge Dean had given him a million years ago, but mercifully, he doesn’t press further. He does linger for a moment, though, so Dean stares hard at the page in front of him. Wills him not to notice or mention the empty bottles crowding Dean's bedside table. On the page, the words swim, meaningless, blurry. He keeps staring at them until he hears Sam sigh and walk away.

He only drops the act—and the book—when he hears the _Law and Order_ theme echoing down the hall from Sam’s room.

Leaning back against the headboard, Dean grinds his teeth together and breathes deeply through his nose. He knows he’s screwed things up irreparably. He _knows_. Knowing doesn’t help.

Since Cas left, Dean has opened his text message thread more times than he can count just to stare at the conversation there. 

Less than a week has passed since those last messages were sent. Less than a week and their entire lives have been ripped out from under them, and Cas is gone from his life. Maybe forever. Probably forever.

He knows he should stop doing it. It's not healthy. He knows this. He opens the thread again anyway.

 **Sent Thursday 4:19PM** Hey Cas, you busy? 

**Received Thursday 4:21PM** Sorry, yes. Is everything okay?

 **Received Thursday 4:21PM** Do you need help?

 **Sent Thursday 4:22PM** Just checking in. Mom’s planning game night tonight… hoped you might be back in time.

 **Received Thursday 4:23PM** I'm sorry. I won’t be back for a few more days :(

 **Sent Thursday 4:19PM** All good, man. Just keep in touch, ok?

 **Received Thursday 4:20PM** I will <3

When that last message had come through, Dean had stared at the heart emoji for so long that his phone had gone to sleep. He'd wondered, briefly, if it was Cas finally giving up on waiting for Dean to make the first move. If it had been an act of bravery; a tiny, hopeful offering to make Dean brave, too. But Dean had still chickened out. 

**Sent Thursday 4:25PM** Jack misses you

 **Received Thursday 4:25PM** Tell him I’m sorry :(

“Jack misses you” had been a lie. Or, maybe it was true, but the kid had been lacking most of his soul by then, so Dean doubts it. “Jack misses you” had been nothing but a projection, a buffer for his own worthless feelings, and it was goddamn pathetic.

For once in his life, he should have just owned it. Should have just said, _I miss you,_ or _I want you to come home._ Maybe if he’d just—

Three dots appear at the bottom of the screen.

Sucking in a breath, Dean sits up straighter and stares, waits, feels the lump in his throat growing sharper, hotter, more suffocating, until finally, the dots disappear. No message comes.

He waits. Stares. Waits.

 _Come on_ , he thinks as the minutes pass. _Please_.

Nothing. The screen goes dark.

And the thing is--it’s fair. Cas shouldn't have to be the one to reach out. Dean’s the one who screwed everything up. Dean’s the one who has to fix it. Dean's the one who has to try.

There's still a chance. Those three dots, if nothing else, say that Cas isn’t entirely done with him. There’s still a chance. Dean has a chance.

With a look at the empty bottles on his nightstand, he lets out a slow breath, and comes to a decision.

He’s going to fix this, but not tonight.

Not with his head so messed up, not with more alcohol than blood in his system. He needs to plan, to figure this out, to make sure that he doesn’t leave anything up to chance. Not again.

This time, when he gets Cas back, he's keeping him.


End file.
